Targeted dosing to treat pediatric inflammatory bowel disease is challenging because dosing guidelines are based on data gathered from adult subjects of clinical trials. Patients’ families and health care organizations also incur high costs and must try to balance potential benefits against risks of ongoing monitoring.

Mandatory genetic testing of health care professionals could help structure health care organizations’ responses to a pandemic. Patients and more susceptible employees can benefit, and these benefits must be weighed against concerns about fairness, autonomy, genetic privacy, and potential loss of employment opportunities.

Graphic pathographies can illustrate how overreliance on statistics can obscure the clinical relevance of patients’ experiences of anxiety when they’re presented with prognoses.

Transitions in relabeling personalized medicine as precision medicine, precision health, or wellness genomics reflect shifting the locus of responsibility for health from individuals to clinicians and in shifting focus from genetic risk to genetic enhancement.

This portrait of a child against a backdrop of health data suggests how a patient’s individuality can be obscured when precision medicine is used in decision making and developing target therapies.

This photograph of a kaleidoscope of potentially life-saving and potentially life-threatening pills suggests ethical conflict inherent in clinicians’ strivings to meet patients’ pain relief needs without contributing crises of drug diversion.

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing requires that physicians share decision making with patients, not order unnecessary tests or interventions, and refer to genetic specialists when necessary.

Large precision health initiatives like the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us campaign raise important ethical questions about consent, privacy, and inclusivity. This month on Ethics Talk, we explore with Dr Katie Johansen Taber and Ysabel Duron strategies for protecting participants and ensuring that diverse communities are represented.

Clinical momentum—increasingly aggressive treatment in intensive care settings that can violate a patient’s wishes—is charged by ritually intensifying efforts to “save” a patient, reimbursement patterns that privilege acute interventions, and technology-driven health care.

Physicians new to a case might object to an established care plan. Practice variation, clinical momentum, and how value is assigned by different parties to acute care and comfort measures can each contribute to conflict in these cases.